Last week we introduced Chapter 12. Google AdWords Grant Success! What’s Next?. You learned two dependable ways to find effective keywords and how to write AdWords ads.

 

Today we are presenting the full version of Chapter 13.

 

 

Here is a quick summary of the 4 steps in Chapter 13:
Tab 1. Overview: How to optimize AdWords and manage new Account.
Tab 2. Guide 37. Powerful, simple tools: ad extensions, descriptive URLs, budget, ad schedule, and location.
Tab 3. Guide 38. AdWords quality score and ad rank.
Tab 4. Guide 39. AdWords performance statistics: What’s your goal?

 

 

1. Overview of How to optimize AdWords: 15 minutes.
2. Powerful, simple tools. 30 Minutes.
3. AdWords quality score and ad rank. 30 Minutes.
4. AdWords performance statistics. 1 Hour, 45 minutes.

Total Time for Chapter 13: How to Optimize AdWords & Manage your Nonprofit Account Efficiently. Three Hours.

 

 

CHAPTER 13 OVERVIEW. How to Optimize AdWords & Manage your Nonprofit Account Efficiently.

 

This week in Chapter 13, How to Optimize AdWords, we’re going to learn about 1) Powerful, simple tools: ad extensions, descriptive URLs, budget, ad schedule, and location. 2) AdWords quality score and ad rank: bids, clicks, relevance, visitor experience, and position And, 3) AdWords performance statistics: What’s your goal? Donations—right?

 

Learn More details on how to manage your AdWords Grant.

 

Guide 37. Powerful, simple tools: ad extensions, descriptive URLs, budget, ad schedule, and location. Variables that make your ads attractive to your target audience.

 

Sitelink extensions allow you to add up four links that will appear beneath your main ad. Descriptive URLs are a great way of getting additional descriptive information into a relatively small ad—and at the same time giving a potential visitor a level of trust that they are going to go where they want to go when they click on the link. For a business, setting a budget is a safety valve because it caps their daily spending so that they don’t go out of business! As a nonprofit, since you don’t actually have to shell out the cash, you can use the budget for different things. You can schedule ads to run for specific days and hours. And, you can have your ads show in specific locations.

 

Guide 38. AdWords quality score and ad rank. So you’ve done a good job of doing your keyword research, developing your landing pages, and writing good ad copy peppered with your keywords. Then you suddenly find that some of your ads and keywords aren’t working because of a low quality score or low ad rank. How do you find this out and what does it mean?

 

Go to one of your ad groups and click on keywords. The third column, Status, gives you some information on each particular keyword. You can find information such as search volume, bid rank and quality score.

 

 

Clicks? No. Your ultimate goal is donations—right? Consequently, what should you optimize first? What should you weed out? If you already have campaigns whose performance could be improved I would be tempted to start with 1) keywords, 2) then add groups 3) then landing pages, 4) then ads.

 

So now, click on the second tab to learn about Powerful, simple tools. Click on the third tab to learn about AdWords quality score and ad rank. And click on the fourth tab learn about AdWords performance statistics.

 

Next week, in the next chapter (Chapter 14) we’re going to learn about Fine Tuning for Impact. How to increase performance and reduce management time.

 

Enjoy. See you next week.

Copyright © 2016, Tim Magee

 

 

 

Guide 37 Tools. Powerful, simple tools: ad extensions, descriptive URLs, expanded titles, budget, ad schedule and location.

 

Google allows you to add extra information to your ads. These are called ad extensions and are displayed immediately below your ad. They come in 5 types. 1) sitelink extensions, 2) call extensions, 3) location extensions, 4) offer extensions, and 5) app extensions.

 

Google ad grantees are allowed to use the first type, sitelink extensions, as part of their grant benefits, so we’re going to focus on sitelink extensions.

 

Sitelink extensions allow you to add up four links that will appear beneath your main ad as in the illustration below:

 

 

So if you’re a shoe store, you could have four site links that say things like: women’s shoes, men’s shoes, children’s shoes, infant shoes.

 

This way, rather than simply clicking on the main headline link of your ad and being sent to a home page (for example), a visitor could choose to click on women’s shoes and be sent to a more appropriate page. Another thing that sitelink extensions do is that they make your ad bigger and therefore stand out better in relation to other ads.

 

Studies done by Google have shown that sitelinks typically raise ad CTR by between 10% and 20%.

 

Sitelinks allow 25 characters in the headline or ‘link text.’

 

Sitelinks also allow you to add two additional description lines of 35 characters each.

 

 

Extensions are displayed at Google’s discretion. In other words, your site links may not always appear. But if they do show them, your ad will certainly stand out.

 

Log into your Google account. Along the top of your dashboard there are a row of buttons—click on the one that says ad extensions.

 

Then, near the bottom, decide if you want your sitelink extensions to be the same throughout your entire account, simply for one campaign, or simply for a specific ad group.

 

I would recommend starting off at the adgroup level because then you can easily customize sitelinks for ad groups about different subjects.

 

Next click on + EXTENSION and select the ad group that you want it associated with. You can then select existing sitelinks (if you have any!) for this ad group.

 

If not, click on + New sitelink. You will get a form where you can add your link text (up to 25 characters), the URL for the link, and the two description lines (35 characters each). You can also customize things like start and end dates.

 

 

Click save and you’re done! You can create three more for that ad group so that when your ad extensions are shown by Google, your ad will have four links just below.

 

Google: About sitelink extensions
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375416?hl=en

 

Google: Sitelink extension requirements
https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1054210

 

Google AdWords Ad Extensions Cheat Sheet
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/06/03/adwords-ad-extensions-cheat-sheet

 

Everything you Need to Know About Sitelinks
http://www.ppc-essentials.com/everything-need-know-sitelinks/

 

10 Dos and Don’ts for Sitelink Extensions
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/09/06/sitelink-extensions-dos-and-donts

 

Day 18 of 100 Days of AdWords Help: Sitelink Extensions
https://www.searchscientists.com/adwords-help-sitelink-extensions/

 

How to Optimize AdWords: Descriptive URLs.
Descriptive URLs are a great way of getting additional descriptive information into a relatively small ad—and at the same time giving a potential visitor a level of trust that they are going to go where they want to go when they click on the link.

 

So think carefully about your descriptive URLs. Do they contain keywords? Do they give a visitor additional information? Is the description congruent with where the visitor is going to be sent?

 

So if you look at the example below, you can see at the bottom is the Destination URL. That’s where they’re actually going to go when they click on the link. The descriptive URL is sort of like a vanity plate. Hiding behind the description is the true URL. So it’s good and supportive and develops trust. It’s also handy if your organization’s normal URLs are clunky and contain information specific to your IT team.

 

So go back and look at your initial AdWords ads and see if your descriptive URLs are helping you out: You can always edit them!

 

 

How to Optimize AdWords: Budget.
When you log on to your account you are on the Campaign page. The third column of data over is the daily budget for each campaign.

 

For a business, this allows them to place a larger budget on more profitable items—but it is also a safety valve because it caps their daily spending so that they don’t go out of business!

 

As a nonprofit, and not having to actually shell out the cash, you can use the budget for different things.

 

You can also increase the daily budget for campaigns that are going to be more beneficial for your organization. But you can also use the budget to turn down the volume on campaigns that you’re not that interested in any longer.

 

For example, if you’re moving towards the holiday season, you can turn up the budget on your donation campaign and turn down the budget on the golf tournament.

 

To change a campaigns budget simply hover with your cursor over the daily budget figure and click on it make your change. When I make changes like this I tend to add them to my master change log so that I can see what I did over the span of time.

 

How to Optimize AdWords: Ad Schedule.
Click on a campaign. Along the top, click on settings, down near the bottom you’ll find a section called advanced settings and then schedule. Here, you can (for example) dictate that your special holiday donation ad runs from November 15 January 1. Simply click on edit to modify this.

 

You can also change the time of day that the ad runs. This might be more appropriate for a restaurant that has a breakfast campaign and doesn’t want to spend money on clicks for that campaign after 10:00 in the morning. Likewise, they might want to have their lunch campaign set to run from 10 o’clock in the morning until 2:00 in the afternoon. Simply click on edit to modify these times.

 

How to Optimize AdWords: Location.
This can be a big one for a nonprofit. If you want to squeeze all of the money out of your budget, and your nonprofit is located specifically in a small town in Southern California, you can enter the name of that town—and you can even enter the name of the three towns that surround it if you like. You can even do it by postal code

 

If your nonprofit works throughout Los Angeles County, you can enter that instead.

 

Location and ad schedule can be intimately linked. As I’m writing this, I clicked on an ad campaign and then I clicked on ‘settings’ and then ‘locations’. We’re running this ad campaign North America, the UK, and Australia.

 

I was shocked to see that this particular campaign was getting four times as many clicks from the UK as it was from the United States.

 

With the United States having six times the population of the UK I would’ve thought that this statistic would be reversed. So I look into this. This campaign was running twenty four hours a day. So it could be that people in the UK wake up six or eight hours earlier than their US counterparts and so the daily budget gets spent in the UK before people in US wake up.

 

So I shifted the schedule from 24 hours to having the ads begin showing at 4:00 am Pacific Coast time which would be 11:00 in the UK. Just doing that has already begun changing the CTR ratio between the US and the UK.

 

So another solution could be to create a separate UK campaign that I can manage separately from the US campaign. I can adjust their ad schedule to start a few hours later to give the US a chance to catch up.

 

Google AdWords has a ton of tools like this which can be very useful for uncovering challenges.

 

Copyright © 2016, Tim Magee

 

 

 

Guide 38 Quality Score. AdWords quality score and ad rank: Bids, clicks, relevance, visitor experience, and position. White Speech Bubble. Yeesh.

 

Guide 38. AdWords quality score and ad rank: bids, clicks, relevance, visitor experience, position and conversions. White Speech Bubble. Yeesh.

 

In Guide 37 of this chapter, we learned about ad extensions, descriptive URLs, expanded titles, budget, ad schedule and location.

 

So you’ve done a good job of doing your keyword research, developing your landing pages, and writing good ad copy peppered with your keywords. Then you suddenly find that some of your ads and keywords aren’t working because of a low quality score or low ad rank.

 

Go to one of your ad groups and click on keywords.

 

The third column, Status, gives you some information on each particular keyword. [You can also do this by clicking on Ads instead of Keywords and get slightly different information].

 

In the keyword’s status column, you can find information such as the keyword:

 

At times this is a little confusing because even though you receive one of these negative messages, you might see that that word is getting impressions and clicks with a good CTR.

 

At other times you might find that those keywords aren’t getting any clicks, or that the click through rate is low and is dragging down your overall click through rate. That might prompt you to pause or remove that keyword. But we will look at that in the next chapter in Guide 40: Minimizing poor CTR keywords.

 

If you hover your cursor over the little white speech bubble a small window will open up with additional information. This additional information explains in greater detail the message and status column for each individual keyword.

 

You will see messages like these under:

 

 

This is where managing your AdWords account becomes a tad more sophisticated. This is one of the main reasons that I suggested that you start small and stay small was so you could begin understanding how some of these things work—and you begin having some positive results.

 

Let’s start from the top of the ladder and work down the rungs.

Ad rank is how your ad ranks against other ads and whether it will show on the first page search results. AdWords will show up to four ads at the top of page and three more ads at the bottom of the page. Then, if you click on page 2 you will find more ads.

 

The idea is to have a high enough ad rank that your ad will show on the page 1 results because very few people look at the second page results anymore.

 

Ad rank is determined through a combination of your bid (whether it’s $2 or $10) and your quality score.

 

In the Google nonprofit ad grant program you are not in some special nonprofit AdWords division, you’re right in the real AdWords Program competing with everyone else.

 

As the ad grant program has a $2 limit for your keyword bid, and commercial customers may be bidding $10 for the same keyword, their ad is going to have a higher rank and will more likely show on the first page results. We’ll talk about how you can improve your odds in the next chapter.

 

On the other hand, I find that a number of my keywords that have this message next to them actually show at a cost under two dollars:

Below first page bid

First page bid estimate: $6.66

 

I don’t know why that is. It could be that historically people have bid $6.66 on that keyword and are no longer bidding on it. It could be that people are bidding $6.66 on that keyword but have it scheduled to only show between eight in the morning and five in the afternoon—so their bid goes away and my keyword will show for less than $2.00.

 

So if I have a keyword that is below the first page bid that is performing for me—I just leave it in place.

 

Quality score is one of the most difficult aspects of AdWords to understand. It’s also fairly confusing to try to solve.

 

It’s also one of the many variables in the AdWords program that affects other variables. So for example you might have some great keywords—but that aren’t performing because of a low quality score. Sometimes it is difficult to determine whether the problem is with your keywords or with the quality score. In other words, if you remove the keywords will quality score go up? If you managed to raise your quality score would the keywords begin to work for you?

 

This is one of the reasons why I keep careful track of changes that I’ve made to keywords because as time goes on and you learn how to increase your overall quality score maybe some of those removed keywords could become useful again.

 

 

Here is a great discussion by PPCBossman on a Google Marketing Community Site.
https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Performance-Optimization/Improve-Quality-Score/td-p/440867

 

There are a number of signals used to determine QS but they are generally categorized by Google into 3 categories when you review your quality scores: expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.

 

You need to essentially have a closed loop. Your objective ultimately is to serve the end user. Think to yourself, if I were to search for this keyword, what kind of ad copy would I be enticed to click on and then, what type of landing page would I want to see once I clicked the ad. You want to create that perfect experience where the keywords in your ad groups are all similarly themed to the point where your ad copy will make sense for any of the keywords in that ad group and then send the users to the most relevant and useful landing page.

 

Here are a few areas that may help you.

 

The first step I would think is to re-evaluate your keyword choices. When you choose keywords, the assumption here is that one way or another, these keywords are related to products, services, topics or ideas that are already, in some way, covered on your website. You also want to make sure that you group these keywords in tight themes to allow yourself to create great ad copies later on.

 

The keywords you choose could match a variety of search queries, depending on the match types you choose. The broader the match type, the more variety of search queries your keywords will be eligible to match for. To get an idea of how your keywords are currently performing, you can take a look at your search terms report. When your ads get impressions for irrelevant search queries, the likelihood of a user clicking on your ad is reduced significantly and if they do click, it’s likely a waste of money because they’re not looking for your products or services in the first place and could likely bounce immediately. By altering your match types and making use of negative keywords to narrow down the search queries that your keywords will match for, you will start to make improvements to your clickthrough rate that will ultimately have a positive impact your quality scores.

 

How to Optimize AdWords: Keyword Relevance. Relevance is a keyword status that measures how closely related your keyword is to your ads.

Now, once you have nice, tightly themed ad groups, where the keywords would all be relevant to the ads within this ad group, you want to create great, eye catching and relevant ad copy. Try to use your keywords in your ad copy, this helps create that connection (the closed loop I referenced earlier). When a user searches for a particular product or service and then sees that you offer that product or service by reading your ad, there is an increased chance that they will click your ad to find out more. But, it doesn’t end there, you need to also entice the user, as well as use marketing tactics like creating urgency and using strong call to actions in your efforts.

 

The final point in creating great ads that I’d like to mention is to choose the best possible landing page to send your prospective customers. I’ll touch more on websites and landing pages shortly but be sure that you’re sending your users to the best choice on your website to get them as close as possible to what they’re searching for. The idea here is to create high quality ads.

 

If someone is searching for ‘evening gowns’, you’d want to send them to a page with ‘evening gowns’ or something very close to this concept, not to a page with ‘shoes’.

 

The landing page experience status describes whether your landing page is likely to provide a good experience to customers who click your ad and land on your website. Google likes to review landing pages for expected performance and they refer to this as landing page experience. As I previously mentioned, it’s very important to ensure that the landing pages you select for your ads continue your relevancy theme that you started with your keyword selection. You may also need to work on your landing pages a bit to make sure that they provide an amazing experience for the users.

 

Compare it to a real life shopping experience. You’re walking through a shopping center, looking for the latest smartphone (think of this as searching on Google.com) and you notice in the window of a store that they have the model you’re looking for and a sign that suggests you can get a great deal (this is your ad copy). Now you open the door of the store (click on the ad), walk in and you find that the ceiling is leaking rusty water all over the floor, the sales folks pay you no attention and the store smells like rotting garbage. The chance that you’re going to stick around are very slim and you’re probably going to look for more options. Your website and landing pages can have the same impact. Provide great information about your product or services incorporating your keywords, use your unique selling propositions, reiterate any deals or promotions and provide a clear and easy path for the user to achieve their goal, whether that be to fill out a form for more information, make a purchase or place a phone call as a few examples. Not only will these practices provide a better landing page experience but ultimately will also provide a better opportunity for conversions.

 

As you know, the website and landing page are not the only factors, the expected (and actual) clickthrough rate on your ads is also a well known and big factor in quality scores. Many of the keyword and ad suggestions I previously covered are really geared toward improving this metric. Part of this is based on historical data from your account and sometimes from the way the keywords have performed for other advertisers as well. What you can focus on though, is your own efforts. Eliminating irrelevant impressions for your ads is the best way to immediately improve your CTR.

 

Now, this is really only scratching the surface of what goes into Quality Scores – there are numerous articles and resources available online where you can continue your research but I hope this will help clarify some specific and immediate ways you can work to try and improve your quality scores and the performance of your account.

 

 

 

Guide 39 Stastics. AdWords performance statistics: What’s your goal? Clicks? No. Your ultimate goal is donations—right? Consequently, what should you optimize first? What should you weed out?

 

Guide 39. AdWords performance statistics: What’s your goal? Clicks? No. Your ultimate goal is donations—right? Consequently, what should you optimize first? What should you weed out?

 

In Guide 38 of this chapter, we learned about quality score and ad rank.

 

When I first started working with AdWords it was really very exciting to dream up keywords and write ads—and then to see our monthly spend rise and rise until we reached the $10,000 a month ad Grant limit. I really felt we were getting somewhere.

 

But after a couple of years and a lot of work, I wasn’t certain what it was we were getting.

 

So I really began researching what successful people in the AdWords community were focusing on. I believe it boils one single word: sales.

 

In the nonprofit world sales would likely be interpreted as: donations. But you could also look for volunteers, clients, branding, and subscribers.

 

I keep mentioning starting small and staying small. You could do that by focusing on one single one of those goals. That would help your stay focused. And then, once you have learned how to bring donations in from your AdWords grant—or find more volunteers—then you can begin developing new campaigns with what you’ve learned.

 

So spending your daily budget is a great accomplishment. Getting people to click on your ads is a great accomplishment. Fine-tuning your keywords and your ad copy to raise your CTR is a great accomplishment. But are you getting any donations from this hard work?

 

I would suggest starting right the first time by 1) developing tight landing pages, 2) then keywords, 3) then ads.

 

In the last guide, PPCBossman said:

"You need to essentially have a closed loop. Your objective ultimately is to serve the end user. Think to yourself, if I were to search for this keyword, what kind of ad copy would I be enticed to click on and then, what type of landing page would I want to see once I clicked the ad."

 

I would recommend that your landing pages should be about one topic. So if you accept donations for food bank, for a day care center, and for homeless shelter, try and carefully separate those landing pages into three: each about just one of those subjects.

 

Talk to your donors so you can really know specifically what a donor is looking for (Voice of the Customer!). Then you can really craft a concise landing page to best meet their needs. Place similar themed keywords in their own ad groups.

 

Go back to Chapter Five and refresh your memory about key words and simple landing pages.

 

Once you’ve done that, your keyword research is vastly simplified and much more targeted. You can then use the keyword research from the landing page for your AdWords ad groups.

 

Once you have placed tightly themed keywords into individual ad groups (you might have three ad groups for single landing page—each one of which focuses on one keyword theme) you can begin writing ads. The ads should be peppered with that ad groups keywords. So those are both the keywords that the end user is using for her search terms, and at the same time are the keywords behind the landing page—that are then incorporated into your AdWords ad group and ads. Closed loop.

 

So your ad will meet the expectation of the end-user and hopefully cause them to click. When they go to the landing page, they will see their keyword and realize they are in the right place. You will answer all of their questions about the specific topic—and there will be a call to action: Donate! Subscribe!

 

If you already have campaigns whose performance could be improved I would be tempted to start with 1) keywords, 2) then add groups 3) then landing pages, 4) then ads.

 

We will be covering keywords in detail in the next chapter in Guide 40. But in essence you can remove words that simply aren’t performing. You can analyze in the status column why Google feels they aren’t performing.

 

It could be you just have too many keywords in an ad group and so some of them aren’t showing ads. Try getting the number of key words down to between 15 and 20 by weeding out 1) nonperforming keywords and 2) keywords that aren’t tightly themed with the main group of keywords. As always, keep track of keywords that you remove because they might come in handy in the future.

 

You can also use the many tools that we investigated in the previous guide, Guide 38 to see if there’s something going on in the background like ad schedule or location that could be causing you grief.

 

It’s a good idea to pick one campaign a week and really look through it in detail to see if there are any problems. There can be quite a bit of complexity if you have a number of ads and keywords in a campaign—so it’s really a good idea to look through it.

 

Once, when I was getting started, I discovered that out of 450 keywords in my account, five of them were using between 60% and 80% of my monthly budget. The really embarrassing thing is that they were keywords that were fairly general that weren’t really targeting the kind of end-users that I wanted for making donations. So the keyword ‘online’ in one of my ad groups and it was using of over $4,000 of my monthly budget for no benefit.

 

This is how discovered the root of the problem: I went to keywords, search terms and read the search terms people used when ‘online’ triggered an ad.

 

In the search results for my keyword ‘online,’ those Internet searchers weren’t looking for anything to do with me—but they were using up a lot of my budget. Their example search terms for ‘online’ ranged from Barbie dolls to avatars—but none of them related to what we were trying to promote in our AdWords ad—which this particular case was an online training course on ‘Disaster Risk Reduction.’

 

When your ads get impressions for irrelevant search queries, the likelihood of a user clicking on your ad is reduced significantly and if they do click, it’s likely a waste of money because they’re not looking for your products or services in the first place and could likely bounce immediately. PPCBossman

 

Just the simple fact that I was able to spot these greedy, problematic keywords and make the connection with how big of a problem they were causing cumulatively, allowed me to make the necessary corrections. So it’s a good idea once in a while just to look through your different campaigns and see if you spot something you hadn’t seen before.

 

Negative keywords are another way to solve this kind of a problem. In my case ‘online’ was too general of a term and people reached it in hundreds of search term combinations that included the word ‘online.’

 

On the other hand you might have a keyword which is perfect for your ad group, which isn’t included in so many search term combinations. In that case, you can add negative keywords that will prevent your ad showing when people enter them as search terms.

 

So for example, in our ad group on our fundraising coaching program, I added negative keywords to that ad group like basketball and football [basketball coaching and football coaching aren’t really relevant to our program] which greatly reduced the irrelevant searches, impressions, clicks.

 

You might be able to split an ad group into two ad groups by creating two tightly themed groups of keywords out of the original ad group that contained a mixture of keywords.

 

You want to create that perfect experience where the keywords in your ad groups are all similarly themed to the point where your ad copy will make sense for any of the keywords in that ad group and then send the users to the most relevant and useful landing page. PPCBossman

 

So for a store selling women’s shoes, you wouldn’t want to have running shoes, evening shoes, high heels, and flats as keywords all in the same ad group. You could set up a campaign on women’s shoes, and then have different types of shoes for your ad groups’ names – and then use variations of their names as keywords.

 

You can also use the many tools that we investigated in the previous guide, Guide 38 see if there’s something going on in the background like ad schedule or location that could be causing you grief.

 

For example, in guide 37 by looking through some of the different tools in ‘Settings,’ I was able to discover under ‘locations’ for one of my campaigns that the daily budget was getting entirely gobbled up in the UK before people even woke up in the morning in the US. In that particular situation I was able to use ad scheduling to begin getting the ad to show later in the day in the UK so that people US could see it too.

 

Now that you’ve tightened up your keywords and ad groups you can make a new list of your current keywords that you are using in an ad group that is linked to a specific landing page.

 

Landing pages are a little complicated because you’re hoping to get organic searches leading to your landing page (and so you may have included some keywords to encourage that), plus you want your AdWords end-users to have a good experience on the landing page too (perhaps with some slightly different, additional keywords.

 

In other words, you might have 15 keywords (which people are using as search terms) in an ad group that will trigger ads to show that will lead to a specific donation page on your website.

 

That same donation page hopefully has a focus keyword that you have peppered into the landing page copy to create enough density for that keyword so that Google searches will have an easy time finding it.

 

So you will also need to pepper in the 15 keywords from your ad group into the landing page copy too. This way, when an Internet searcher uses one of your keywords it will trigger your ad to show, they will see the keyword again in your ad and therefore possibly click on it, and when they land on your landing page they will sense the relevance because they’ll see the keyword again and they will have excellent landing page experience.

 

The focus keyword on your landing page can at times be challenging. If you went through the process back in chapter 5 of researching keywords you may have found the perfect focus keyword for your landing page—and it may be performing well for you. However, at times, when you try to incorporate that keyword into your AdWords ad group, it may be way over budget. Maybe it’s a $16 keyword you have a $2 keyword budget.

 

It would probably increase your quality score if your landing page’s focus keyword was integrated into your ad group’s keywords. So you might need to do some research to determine which is going to be more valuable to you. A focus keyword that is absolutely spot on for organic searches. Or a focus keyword that has 1 foot in your ad group and 1 foot on the landing page and will raise your quality score.

 

You can do an A/B test by copying the landing page in question, and giving it a new focus keyword that’s part of your ad group’s keyword collection. And then see which landing page is working best for you.

 

I would suggest trying to find an hour a week that you could set aside to simply look through a single campaign. There is so much analytical data available for each one of your campaigns, and also so many variables that you can adjust, that it’s hard to keep track of everything and spot something that may be going wrong.

 

Simply take a single campaign and look at its main working page data to see if there’s anything unusual, and then drop down to the ad group level to see if there’s anything unusual; then do the same thing for keywords and the unique ads themselves. It’s a good idea to look in the status column (with its little white speech bubble), and the settings tab with all of its different features, and the ad extensions tab. Be sure and study things like click through rates, impressions and conversions through these different windows, because each one of these different analysis tools gives a slightly different perspective which can sometimes point out a problem.

 

Your one-hour goal is to do three things. 1) Make small, planned changes that will incrementally optimize and improve the performance of a single campaign (I would aim at improving your quality scores, click through rates, and conversions). Then look for low hanging fruit. 2) Such as keywords that are pulling down your overall click through rate. You can simply pause them for the time being and see if that has a positive impact before removing them. Again, an improved quality score might make an old keyword relevant again. 3) Look for larger problems that you hadn’t seen before that might suddenly be visible through one of the many tools. These would be like the five keywords and the UK problem that were using up 80% of my monthly budget. If you can spot one of those a month that will be great win—plus it will keep them from accumulating and aggregating.

 

 

Copyright © 2016, Tim Magee

 

 

Next week, in the next chapter (Chapter 14: Fine Tuning for Impact. How to increase performance and reduce management time) we’re going to learn about minimizing poor CTR keywords and maximizing high performing keywords, landing pages, and conversions, and about Google Analytics and Google Webmaster (now called Google Search Console).

 

This week, enjoy learning to How to Optimize AdWords accounts. See you next week.

 

Want to enjoy the Chapter 13 AdWords learning process with a live teacher? See the online, teacher-led course behind this chapter.

 

Copyright © 2016, Tim Magee